Chapter 4

The grown-ups decided that only Grandad, the Grannies, Uncle Jake and the twins would go to meet our new friends near their new camp.

‘We’d have to empty all the stuff out of the back of the Unimog to get us all in. We don’t all need to go.’

I was so upset at the idea of being left behind that they decided to take me along too. Mum and Dad and Uncle Sid and Aunty Anna and the three little ones stayed with the trucks.

The road to the point where we hoped we’d meet up with them again was just a gravel track, but it wasn’t in bad condition considering it hadn’t been maintained for thirty-four years. The surface had gone completely in many places, but there was a rocky foundation that had survived pretty well – better than the foundation of the main road had in the washouts. It didn’t give the Unimog any problems at all.

‘The trucks would get through here, no problem, but it’d knock hell out of the tyres. The Unimog’s light on its feet, I don’t think its tyres are coming to much harm at all.’

‘I wouldn’t want to bring the trucks up here anyway. Imagine having to turn them round, if we had to go back.’

We found a prominent hill close to the road at about the right distance. Granny Persie even managed to drive the Unimog across country right onto the top of the hill, so we were confident they’d be able to find us easily.

We waited and waited. Grandad scanned the surrounding land with the binoculars, but couldn’t see any sign of anyone, nor any reindeer. It began to get dark, and everyone began to think they’d decided against joining us. Eventually, after it was quite dark, Grandad and the Grannies decided to call it a day, and we set off back to the trucks, feeling very sad.

‘I’d have thought Lieđđi would at least have come and let us know, so we wouldn’t hang around waiting for them, if they’ve decided not to come.’

It was much slower driving back down the track in the dark. We couldn’t really go much faster than walking pace. Then suddenly, about halfway back to the trucks, there was Lieđđi in the middle of the track, waving like mad.

It took the Grannies a little while to calm her down, and longer still to work out what she was saying. They didn’t fully understand, but it was clear that something dreadful had happened, and that she desperately wanted us to come with her. Could the Unimog come across country, at least part of the way?

‘We’ve no torches, so we’d find it pretty difficult on foot. We’ll get the Unimog as far as we can, and then try to position it to give the best light we can with its headlights.’

‘We’ll probably do better without the headlights. We wouldn’t be able to see a thing in the shadows with them on. Lieđđi’s managed to get here, we’ll manage with her to guide us.’

The Unimog didn’t get very far before they decided it would be easier to walk. Lieđđi wanted Grandad and Uncle Jake to go with her, and one of the Grannies to translate, but she made it clear it would be better if I didn’t go. Granny Merly and Aunty Dot stayed with me. The others disappeared very quickly into the night. We felt very alone, sitting there in the dark in the Unimog.

We’d no idea how long they would be gone. It began to get cold, and Granny Merly started the engine to get the heater working. ‘They’ll hear it, but they’ll know I’m just keeping us warm. They won’t think I’m driving off without them, don’t worry, Mikey. They must be a lot colder than us, though. How Lieđđi manages I don’t know, unless those reindeer skins are warmer than they look. What’s it like here in winter? And them as skinny as they are, too.’

I snuggled down with my head on Granny Merly’s lap and her arm around me. I was worried about what was going on, and couldn’t sleep. But I did, whether I wanted to or not.

I didn’t wake up until the Unimog started moving again, and even then I didn’t wake up properly, and didn’t think about whether everyone had come back or what was happening at all. Granny Merly had lifted me right onto her lap, and my head was on her shoulder, because the Unimog was so full, but I didn’t know what had really been going on until the next morning.

Lieđđi and Suonjar understood Gealbu’s gestures very well – their own private family sign language. He had told them in no uncertain terms that they should join our expedition, while he carried on living with the reindeer. They should forget about him.

‘But how would you survive? You can’t even put the lávvu up by yourself.’

‘I’ll manage. I can very quickly make a smaller lávvu that I can put up on my own. And the reindeer won’t leave me behind, I know that. They only go on ahead with you two because they know you won’t leave me behind.’

‘You should come with us. We should all go. The reindeer will be okay, they’re wild animals really. They’re our friends, not our property.’

‘The foreigners don’t really want me, it’s you two they want. Who would want me?’

‘We do. And they do, too, they really do. I can tell that they see more than skin deep. They know you’re intelligent and capable.’

‘Do they? Or are you just saying that? They want you two because there aren’t enough of them, they know they’re too small a herd and will get inbred. They won’t want to breed with me.’

‘That’s not the whole meaning of life. And anyway, who knows? They didn’t just invite me and Suonjar, they invited all three of us.’

But Gealbu wouldn’t believe them, and was determined to stay with the reindeer.

‘If you’re staying, we’re staying too. We can’t go without you.’

‘You must. Things are getting worse here. Think about your old age.’

‘Think about your old age, too. All alone.’

‘Everyone dies sometime. I’ll live until I die, just like everyone else. Now go and find them, and tell them you’re going with them.’

‘No.’

Gealbu set off walking as fast as he could. Lieđđi and Suonjar followed him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to kill myself. Then you’ll have to go with the foreigners.’

‘You have to come with us!’

‘No.’

‘Then we’re not going either.’

Between the two of them, they could stop him going anywhere. He’d seemed to accept that, but late that morning he’d found an opportunity to throw himself off a high rock.

He’d expected to die, but he didn’t. How many bones were broken nobody knew, but he was alive and conscious and clearly in great pain. He tried to gesture to his cousins when they reached him, but his right arm and some ribs were broken, and he couldn’t make himself understood. They guessed he was trying to tell them to leave him alone to die, but of course they couldn’t do that. They made a makeshift stretcher out of their skis, lifted him onto it as gently as they could, and then started to carry him towards the road.

They didn’t know this part of the country well – their normal route didn’t meet the road for another half day’s trek – so it was difficult. Lieđđi went ahead prospecting for a route they could manage carrying the stretcher with Gealbu on it. She saw the Unimog going up the road in the distance, and wished she’d realized they wouldn’t have gone straight up there first thing in the morning. She could have been by the road and stopped them and got them to come and help.

She and Suonjar decided to use the best of the daylight getting Gealbu as far towards the road as they could, then at dusk Lieđđi would go and make sure she caught them coming down the road – or walk up the road in the dark to find them if they decided to stay late.

It was much harder in the dark. Luckily there was a moon, but it was only half a moon and not very high in the sky, and clouds kept on covering it. The foreigners weren’t used to walking on rough country in the dark, so Lieđđi had to watch out for them, too. Eventually they reached Suonjar and Gealbu. Suonjar was very relieved to see them.

Grandad and Uncle Jake were amazed how light Gealbu was, even on a stretcher made out of six wooden skis. Lieđđi held onto Grandad’s hand holding the front end of the stretcher, and helped make sure of his footing, while Suonjar did the same with Uncle Jake at the other end. At first, Granny Persie and Aunty Belle brought up the rear.

At this stage, none of us ‘foreigners’ knew what had really happened – all we knew was that Gealbu had had a terrible accident. Nobody had any proper medical training beyond basic first aid, but we did at least have a first aid kit with painkillers and bandaging, somewhere relatively comfortable for him to lie, and the means to feed him without him having to follow the reindeer.

They’d left me sleeping with my head on Granny Merly’s lap. They emptied half the stuff out of the back of the Unimog, making a neat pile by the side of the road, to make space for the stretcher with Gealbu on it. Suonjar and Aunty Belle sat with him, half to try to keep him as comfortable as possible, and half to make sure he didn’t try to get out of the back of the moving vehicle. Aunty Belle sought out his unhurt hand in the dark and held it gently.

Granny Persie dug out the first aid kit and found the pain killers, but Gealbu wouldn’t take the tablets. ‘There’s morphine in the kit in the trucks, but I don’t think I’d trust it after all this time. I don’t know whether the tablets are still any good, but at least they wouldn’t do any harm. I’m not at all sure about the safety of injecting ancient morphine.’

They wondered whether one of the Grannies should sit in the back with them to translate, but decided it wasn’t necessary. Granny Persie was the best person to drive the Unimog on a rough road in the dark, and they didn’t want to disturb me by moving Granny Merly.

Aunty Belle and Suonjar were fast asleep in each other’s arms when we arrived back at the trucks. Aunty Belle’s hand was still firmly in Gealbu’s. Whether he was asleep or not nobody was quite sure, but he was breathing okay. The Grannies covered the three of them with blankets and left them where they were.

The next morning they very carefully moved Gealbu into the back of the sleeping truck. Lieđđi and Suonjar had a conversation with him – after a fashion. His usual animated gesturing was impossible for him; all he could do was nod almost imperceptibly. They had to phrase everything as questions he could nod yes or no to.

He was in pain, but had managed to sleep during the night. Could someone arrange something he could wee into? It was going to be harder when he had to empty his bowels, but with help he thought he’d manage. And yes, he felt a complete fool for landing everyone in this stupid situation and yes he was very sorry. But no-one gave him the option to say yes, he should have been left to die.

The Grannies felt him all over, trying to find out what was broken. There was nothing they could do to help his ribs to mend; only time would do that. They splinted his broken arm as best they could.

‘It’s a good job his back isn’t broken.’

‘We’re going to have to reorganize ourselves a bit. We’d have had to anyway, but with Gealbu bedridden for at least three or four weeks it’s going to be a bit more difficult. We won’t all be able to sleep in the same truck, that’s for sure.’

‘Some of us can sleep in the cabs.’

‘That’s a possibility, but only two can lie down in a cab, and they can’t snuggle up. It’ll be hard to keep warm.’

‘How on Earth those three have been keeping warm in their lávvu, I’ll never know.’

‘I think you might, really. You can ask them!’

The answer was ‘reindeer skins,’ and like us, ‘snuggle up’. Then Lieđđi wanted to know where everyone would sleep, so Granny Persie translated the discussion we’d just been having into Swedish for her.

‘Oh, we should retrieve our lávvu and our skins. We can put the lávvu up every night, it takes no time. If Gealbu’s taking up a lot of room in the truck, two or three of you can come and sleep in the lávvu with us, there’s plenty of room. We never bothered to make it smaller after our cousins died.’

It was only much later we learnt that they’d sometimes had one or two young reindeer snuggled up with them in the lávvu to help keep them warm. They laugh about it now, but they were embarrassed about it at first. But why? It was simply sensible.

Granny Persie, Uncle Sid and Lieđđi set off in the Unimog to go and pick up all the stuff that had been left beside the road, and to get the lávvu and the skins, and some of Lieđđi’s, Suonjar’s and Gealbu’s other things. Lieđđi wanted to say goodbye to the reindeer, too. Uncle Sid started to load the stuff from the side of the road, while the other two headed off to where the lávvu and the rest of their things were.

Granny Persie saw that Lieđđi was about to catch a reindeer, and asked her why.

‘I’ll kill it when we get back to the vehicle. It wouldn’t be happy riding, better to kill it first. But there’s no sense carrying it to the road when it can walk.’

‘We’ve got plenty of meat, and we can shoot wild animals whenever we need more. Why kill one of your beloved reindeer?’

‘This is a young male, I’d normally let him get fat over the summer before killing him. There’s plenty of buried meat near here, I could just dig some of that up. But fresh liver and intestines would be good for Gealbu. Well, good for all of us, but especially for Gealbu. And there’s plenty of males in the herd, they won’t miss one. Well, he’s still young, his mother will miss him, but she’ll get over it pretty quickly.’

That was the first time any of us foreigners had heard of burying meat. Granny Persie wanted to know how long they kept meat underground, and why it didn’t go bad, and how long you could keep it after you’d dug it up.

‘It depends. In a place where the ground stays frozen all year at the depth you bury it, it keeps for a year, no problem. We don’t often leave anything much longer than that. Why would you dig it up and then not eat it straight away, though? Oh, I see, to take some more with us in the trucks. I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t know.’

‘A few days, anyway, if we cook it thoroughly first. We’ll not take a chance on keeping it any longer than that. One invalid is enough!’

So Lieđđi took one young reindeer, and dug one carcass up. ‘Between seventeen of us, we can eat that much in a few days. I wonder if anyone will find the rest? It seems such a waste.’

‘We could dig it up and leave it for the scavengers.’

‘And help the wolves to breed? Our old neighbours wouldn’t thank us for that. Anyway, it’s far too much trouble. If our old neighbours weren’t so far away, we could let them know where it is. That’d give them a surprise – the skinny outcasts giving the fatties presents like that!’

Granny Persie laughed. ‘Do you want to let them know? Can they read?’

‘I don’t know. How would you leave them a message anyway?’

‘We’d think of some way, but if you’re not sure whether they can read, there’s no point making much effort. Do you know where they are, though? If they’re near a passable road, we could go and visit them.’

‘I know roughly where they are, but I’m not sure you could get anywhere near there with a vehicle. More trouble than it’s worth, anyway. They’re quite fat enough, and their herds are healthy. I just thought it would be funny to offer them food, when they’ve never once offered to help us, even when we were pretty desperate. I’d rather not visit them anyway, to be honest. Especially not now we’re leaving.’

On the way back to the Unimog, Granny Persie and Lieđđi met Sid coming to find them. He’d finished reloading the stuff that had been left at the side of the road. He was surprised to see them carrying meat and leading a reindeer. Lieđđi loaded him with what she was carrying, gave him the end of the rope she’d put round the reindeer’s neck, and said she’d go back and fetch some more things. ‘Just tie him to the truck, and you two come back and help me. The main thing I want to fetch is the lávvu, but there’s some other stuff, too.’

‘How on Earth do you move all this stuff? I can imagine pulling it along on a sledge in winter, but how do you manage when there’s no snow?’

‘Reindeer. There are several of them who don’t mind carrying a load, as long as you don’t overdo it. The biggest male is the only one who’ll carry the lávvu. We don’t normally move much once the snow’s gone, anyway. This year’s been hard. We’ve been getting used to the snow lasting quite late, then this year although it was very cold during the winter and there was a lot of snow, it went a bit early. Well, earlier than it’s gone in recent years. Lots of rain. We’d normally be well up into the mountains by now, away from these damned mosquitoes.’

‘Lucky for us. We’d have missed you completely.’

‘Well, lucky for us, anyway. Another day and we’d have seen your lights and wondered what was going on, but been too far away to investigate. Two days the other way, and it would have been one of the other families you met, not us. Lucky for us either way.’

‘Do you think the other families saw our lights? Then again, yesterday? Are they too far away to come and see what’s going on?’

‘I’m sure they saw the lights, but yes, they’re quite a long way away. I’m not sure whether they’d want to investigate anyway. We weren’t sure at first, but we decided at least to take a look. We thought we could watch you for a while without you seeing us. You had the fire in your eyes, and we were out in the dark. Then you just seemed like a cheerful family, and here we are.’

‘It’s probably just as well it was you three we’ve met, not one of the other families. We’re very glad to increase our numbers by three, but more than that would be difficult for us. We could have brought more trucks, but we didn’t think about finding more people when we decided just to bring these five. We just calculated that it was better to have two drivers for each truck, so we could keep going longer each day.’

‘You had more trucks? How did you keep them going? Our parents used to have a truck and a couple of snowmobiles. Maybe they were still going when we were babies, I don’t know. If we hadn’t seen the rusting remains of them, we’d have only half believed the stories they told us.’

Then Granny Persie had to tell Lieđđi all about how we’d had loads of vehicles back at the old farm, and how we’d found the military depot. That led into lots of stories about our family history, and Lieđđi’s. Lieđđi killed the reindeer and they all loaded the Unimog without a break in the storytelling, which was still going on when the three of them arrived back at our camp.

Lieđđi and Suonjar skinned and gutted the reindeer. To everyone’s amazement, they washed out the intestines, cut them and the liver and heart up, and offered it all round – raw.

‘Don’t you worry about picking up parasites?’

Lieđđi didn’t even know the word, and Granny Persie had to explain. Lieđđi wasn’t worried at all.

‘Everybody eats the innards raw, it’s good for you.’

Grandad and the Grannies reckoned that if the locals ate reindeer innards raw, then they could too. In the end we all did.

Lieđđi was especially keen to feed plenty of liver to Gealbu, ‘to help him heal quickly.’

Granny Persie reckoned she could see the sense in that, and if anybody knows about such things, it’s Granny Persie.

Then Lieđđi wanted Granny Persie to show her how to use the stove.

‘We usually cook the meat, the stomach, and the blood.’

She’d collected the blood in a skin when she’d killed the reindeer.

‘You can eat it all raw if you have to, but most of it’s better cooked. Maybe you really do need to cook wolves and foxes, I’ve never heard of anyone eating them at all before.’

She wanted to keep most of the meat for later, but cooked the stomach straight away, complete with all its contents. ‘That’s good stuff, too. You can’t eat lichen like a reindeer does, but you can if a reindeer collects it and half digests it for you.’

She wanted to know how the devil we caught wolves. ‘You couldn’t snare them like you snare a hare.’

Granny Persie started to explain about guns, but Lieđđi stopped her. ‘Oh, our parents told us about those. They used to shoot wolves in the old days, if they were bothering the reindeer. And they shot hares, too, for the pot. But that was before our time. I’d forgotten about those stories. So you still have guns?’

‘Yes, but I don’t know how much longer we’ll have ammunition for them. If we don’t find another gunsmith’s to raid, we’ll run out eventually. Who knows whether their ammunition will still be any good anyway? What we’ve got is okay so far, but for how much longer, who knows?’

‘I wonder what the chances of finding another military vehicle depot are? One more truck would be no bad thing. We can teach you two to drive, anyway.’

I remember the first night I slept in the lávvu. It might have been the third or fourth night it was put up by the side of the road near the trucks. Granny Persie, Mum, Dad and Aunty Dot had moved into the lávvu the very first night, to make room for Suonjar and Gealbu in the truck. All us four little ones had stayed in the truck with Granny Merly. Well, we were with everyone else, too, but Little Liz and I were snuggled up with Granny Merly because we didn’t have our Mum and Dad with us.

Then I decided I wanted to try sleeping in the lávvu. It was funny, being wrapped up in reindeer skins instead of a sleeping bag. Mum said I could bring my sleeping bag into the lávvu if I wanted to, but half the excitement was to be in the skins.

I slept in the lávvu every night after that. Little Liz came with me once or twice, but mostly she preferred to be with Granny Merly in the truck.

Over the next few weeks, lovingly nursed mainly by Suonjar and Aunty Belle, Gealbu’s bones gradually mended, but he lost quite a bit of weight – and he hadn’t had much in the first place. Somewhere in the north of Finland, Grandad shot a hare, thinking that if reindeer innards were okay to eat raw, then probably any herbivore innards would be, and the liver at least would be good for Gealbu’s healing. But the liver was a funny colour, and had lots of little knots in it that Granny Persie said looked like some kind of encysted parasite. They chucked the whole animal away. They didn’t want anyone to eat it, not even cooked.

‘Some scavenger will get it, but there’s no point burying it. We’re not spreading the parasites any more than they’d spread naturally anyway.’

A couple of days later Uncle Sid got another one, and that one was fine, but nobody ate any of it raw. That didn’t bother Lieđđi at all.

‘We always used to cook hare meat when we snared one. I don’t know why, it’s just what we learned from our parents.’

Getting south through Finland was more difficult than going north through Sweden had been. The washouts weren’t deep chasms like they sometimes had been in Sweden, but there were more places where there seemed to be bottomless mud, and often there was no way we could go across country to find an alternative ford – there’d be a lake or a massive bog in the way, and we had to backtrack and find a different road altogether. Turning the trucks round with trailers attached was often a real problem, but we couldn’t detach them and manhandle them, they were much too heavy. Reversing them more than a few metres was very time consuming and tiring for whoever was driving, but a couple of times we had to reverse a kilometre or more before we found anywhere we could turn. After the second time, we took to following the Unimog at a good distance, and not proceeding until Granny Persie radioed to say she’d reached a place where the trucks would be able to turn. Progress was slow, but thank goodness for the intercom!

Somehow we kept getting finding we had to go further and further east, almost to the Russian border. Granny Persie didn’t really want to cross into Russia until we absolutely had to.

‘I’m less confident of finding the things we need once we cross into Russia. I just don’t know enough about the place. And I rather hope we never meet any organized survivors in Russia. I don’t know enough about what they might be like, either.’

Lieđđi and Suonjar had been very nervous about raiding at first, but had rapidly got used to the idea. They weren’t quite sure what we were looking for. The skeletons that we found in the first couple of houses didn’t bother them at all, but it was only when we were collecting tins and jars of food from a house that they realized that a lot of the food were were eating was well over thirty years old. They were amazed that it could possibly still be wholesome after so long. Tins, jars and packets of food were a new idea to them, but they they didn’t mind. They took the same ‘if you can eat it, so can we’ attitude that our family took to the raw reindeer innards.

Lieđđi and Suonjar were learning English fast. Granny Persie was giving them some actual lessons, and teaching them reading and writing, but mainly they were just picking it up from all of us. We all picked up quite a few words of Swedish from them – and some Sami too, for things like lávvu that we’d never known existed before we met our new friends. Grandad sometimes called it a tent, but that’s a word no-one but the oldies knew before, so it was always a lávvu to the rest of us.

They were still ‘new friends’ then. They’re family now. Two extra aunts and an uncle for me!

The oldies used to tell stories about dried meat and fish they used to find when they were raiding. By the time I was born, any dried food in any of the houses we raided was so old that no-one really trusted it.

‘If we were desperate, I suppose we’d maybe boil it thoroughly and eat it, but we’ve always managed to find enough tins and jars not to think about dried food.’

Lieđđi said they’d never heard of it, and you can understand why when they could just bury raw meat and expect it still to be good a year or more later!

‘If we’d known about it, we could have killed two or three more young male reindeer, and tried drying the meat.’

‘A bit sad if we’d just ended up wasting the meat, though.’

I caught sight of Gealbu nodding agreement with that. It was the first time I’d realized how much English he was picking up.

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